Naked to His Enemies

St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Bedford, New York

 

NAKED TO HIS ENEMIES

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge               The Ninth Day of Christmas, January 2, 2005

 

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust [alike].

(Matthew 5:43-44)

 

This is my “third annual” visit to your beautiful church. I love coming here and I deeply appreciate Terry’s invitation to me. He originally invited me to come during Advent as usual, but this time I asked him if we could make a change. I rarely get a chance to preach during the Christmas season, so I asked him for the Ninth Day of Christmas. He protested that the congregation would be very small. I said that didn’t make any difference to me. Sundays like this are much to be treasured. I think you know this. You aren’t here for the show. Most of you, I feel pretty sure, are here because you are committed to the life of the Christian Church.

 

            Now I ask all of you to take a Prayer Book and keep it by you until the end of this sermon. At that time we will all say a prayer together. Let’s find it in the book now and just set it aside in the pew with something to mark the page. It’s on page 816 in the Prayer Book, number 6.

 

            My Biblical text this morning is not particularly associated with Christmas. It is from the Sermon on the Mount, preached by Christ to his disciples. He says this:

 

“You have heard that it was said [in the old days], ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust [alike].

 

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Why would I choose such a text for the Christmas season? I got the idea from listening to the words of a great many Christmas carols and hymns. Generally speaking, the more recent carols tend to be softer and sweeter. They paint a pretty picture with lovable animals, pious sheepherders, and a stable aglow with starlight. In contrast, many of the older hymns and carols are much more hard-hitting. They speak of sin, death and the devil. When the church of earlier times sang about the young mother and her baby lying in the manger, they didn’t necessarily go “ooh” and “aah.” One of our hymns, written in the 5^th century, says this about the infant Jesus:

 

Behold, the world’s creator wears the form and fashion of a slave;

Our very flesh our Maker shares, his fallen creatures all to save.[1]

 

That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? The hymn writer wants us to understand that this baby has been born into the condition of slavery, the condition of his fallen creatures. This is not a theme that we are likely to hear as background music in the shops and malls. There are some difficult and even shocking things in the Christmas music of the Church. Think for instance of “Joy to the World,” written in the 18^th century by the splendid and prolific hymn-writer Isaac Watts. “He comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.” What curse might that be? Why are we singing about curses during the Christmas season?

 

And how about Hymn #98, “Unto us a boy is born,” which was written in the 15^th century? It has a cheerful tune, and the second verse has cows and donkeys in it, but then we get to the third verse:

 

Herod then with fear was filled;

‘A prince,’ he said, ‘in Jewry!’

All the little boys he killed

At Bethlehem in his fury.

 

            Let’s think for a minute about why this massacre of children lies close to the center of the Christmas story. The Third Day of Christmas is the calendar day for the Holy Innocents who were killed by Herod. One of the most famous of the medieval carols was our entrance hymn, the so-called Coventry Carol, “Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child”:

 

Herod the king, in his raging

chargèd he hath this day

his men of might in his own sight

all young children to slay.

¾Coventry carol, 15^th cent.

 

Here is the point. From the very day of his birth our Lord had enemies in high places. That’s what this morning’s Gospel reading is about. The very existence of this “little tiny child” was a threat to those in power. He was born among the lowly, the poor, the oppressed, and the nameless, and yet he was dangerous. He still is dangerous. That’s the message. His presence in the world upsets all our categories.

 

The “good guys” in the Christmas story are the shepherds and the Magi. Herod is the “bad guy.” My 8-year-old grandson’s world of action figures and video games is full of “good guys” and “bad guys.” I have read that the American soldiers in Iraq use the term “good guys” and “bad guys” to identify friends and enemies. However, as we all know by now, one of the most harrowing aspects of the conflict there is that it is often impossible to tell which is which. Warfare in Iraq, as in Vietnam, is fundamentally and radically different from older styles of warfare when the enemy was clearly defined and recognizable. The stories coming out of the military hospitals concentrate on this particular aspect of the soldiers’ post-traumatic stress; a great many of them are haunted by their inability to distinguish friend from foe. Well, this difficulty was a burden that plagued Jesus every day of his life. His dearest friends abandoned him in the end. Peter, who protested mightily and often that he would be loyal to the last, was the first to deny him. It is very important to remember that the people who shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David!” on Palm Sunday were essentially the same people who shouted “Crucify him!” on Good Friday.

 

How is an enemy to be defined? The ground is constantly shifting under our feet. It is much too soon and much too glib to identify anything good coming out of the catastrophe in the Indian Ocean, but it has been noted that the calamity has at least temporarily leveled the playing field in Sri Lanka so that the 20-year civil war between Tamils and Sinhalese no longer seems relevant. When something enormous happens to us, it makes the usual distinctions seem petty indeed.

 

Our present political history has much to do with the identification of enemies. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have been cast in terms of good vs. evil. The Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings have often been cited as examples of this theme.[2] In the New Testament, however, it is much less clear. Take for instance the great passage in Luke which we call the Benedictus. This is part of the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel. Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, bursts forth into a song of praise to God for his wonderful works:

 

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people...that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us...                                      (Luke 1:70-72)

 

What enemies are in view as Zechariah speaks? In the time of the New Testament, the imperial Romans were the enemy of the Jewish population into which our Lord was born. But Christ was not the Redeemer of the Jews only. He was the Redeemer of the Romans also. The Gospel words about Jesus expand to meet every context. When modern congregations sing or say these words, no one is thinking of the Romans. Many Americans will be thinking of Islamic terrorists. Democrats might be thinking of Republicans. Some of you might be thinking of the person in the next pew. None of these identifications, however, are universal enough. Christianity is not an “American religion” any more than it is a Palestinian or Jewish religion.” It transcends categories. Every Christian congregation on earth is promised by God that they “will be saved from the hand of all that hate us.” All over the globe, Christians say or sing these words and they mean various things according to who is singing them.

 

Who hates us? A young girl might think of the other girls in her class who have been sending hateful emails to her. An older person might think of someone in the workplace who appears to be out to get him. It is commonly said that America is hated by Islamic radicals and other groups around the world. But maybe this is not exactly what the Benedictus means when it says we are going to be delivered by God from our enemies. In the final analysis there is something deeper and more challenging here.

 

Jesus was and is dangerous because he turns things upside down. Egregious sinners and social outcasts sat at his feet and heard him gladly, but the “good people,” the religious leaders, were his sworn enemies. This can’t be said often enough. He paid no attention whatever to the usual distinctions. In fact, he upset them. The first will be last and the last will be first, he said, in no uncertain terms. And please let us notice that he did not say this as a maxim, or as a thought for the day, or as a general principle of life. The general principle of life is that the first will be first. From earliest days on the playground, children learn this. Moreover, when Christ said Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, he was not dispensing ordinary utilitarian wisdom. Utilitarian wisdom says love your friends and be nice to people when you can, but be prepared to fight your enemy to the death. That is what wars are all about.

 

The relation of Christians to enemies is unique in religion. There really isn’t anything else like it. The teaching of Jesus about the love of enemies and prayer for those who curse you isn’t based on a pragmatic notion that if you do good to your enemies they will become your friends. There isn’t anything utilitarian or commonsensical about it. It isn’t a generic religious truth. It is based on one thing and one thing only: the unique character of God in Jesus Christ who came into the world surrounded by enemies, persecuted by enemies, betrayed, judged, condemned and crucified by enemies and in so doing put himself in their place—in our place—as the enemies of God himself. For in the final analysis Jesus Christ died not only among his enemies and by the hand of his enemies but for the salvation precisely of his enemies.

 

Now please stay with me as we speak more clearly about who these enemies are. There is no passage of Scripture that makes this more clear than Ephesians 2:3-5 (an extension of this morning’s first lesson). This New Testament book contains some of the most crystal-clear messages of the gospel in the whole Bible. Here is what the apostle writes about us:

 

We were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).

 

The Bible, you see, gives us a God’s eye view of human history. We can’t get that God’s-eye view any other way. The whole human race appears to God as children of wrath, dead through our trespasses. From the perspective of God on high, the whole globe, not just Southeast Asia, is a vast scene of human wreckage. Our natural condition is as enemies of God. It is into such a world as this that Jesus came, a world lying under the curse of sin and death. He came quite literally naked to his enemies.[3]

 

On Friday, there was a column in The Wall Street Journal by an important Christian theologian.[4] It describes the year 2004: “We’ve sat in our living rooms and watched it all [on television]: hurricanes raging serially across Florida, bodies blown up unto banality [in Israel] and throats cut by Iraq’s nihilistic gags. And we witnessed Darfur, a genocide whose deaths ooze day after day, now reaching about 50,000.” And now the undersea earthquake and tsunamis will rank among the most cataclysmic natural disasters in world history. We human beings routinely and obsessively persist in dividing the world into friends and enemies but God’s sun rises on the evil and on the good, and floods come upon the just and on the unjust alike. When God’s eye looks down upon his world, he does not see a world of “good” people and “bad” people. He sees a world gone tragically astray on every front, filled with people who are all, in one way or another, enemies to one another and enemies of God.

 

The column in the Wall Street Journal about the tsunami and the questions it raises was remarkably fine in its analysis. We cannot understand the mystery of why catastrophes happen in the world, the author admits, but (probing deeply into Scripture) he shows how it is all part of the curse that came upon us with the rebellion of Adam and Eve. “The universe languishes in bondage to principalities and powers—spiritual and terrestrial—alien to God.” The trajectory of the Twelve Days of Christmas is the unfolding of the story which tells us how God set his redemptive plan in motion for the salvation of the world—a world at enmity with him and his loving purpose. God in Christ did that. Only a Redeemer who first allowed himself to be given over to his enemies and then emerged victorious is able to say, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.

 

So the distinctive sign of the Christian is not saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. The distinctive sign of the Christian is not a plaque of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse. The distinctive sign of the Christian is not prayers before football games. The distinctive sign of the Christian, the sign of true assimilation to Christ, is the attitude toward the enemy. For in the last analysis we Christians recognize that enemy as ourselves.

 

 

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Let us pray (page 816, number 6).

 

 

 God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.